1.29.2008

It's always wonderful when animals visit the city! We sometimes ride our bikes past this place, it has some great looking houseboats there where people actually live! I love it and there is a fun restaurant up in the park beyond. I hope the seal comes back to visit often! I would like to see him sometime :)

A seal in the Hudson River, off West 79th Street, on Monday. This is not such an unusual sight in recent years, park rangers say, perhaps because the river is cleaner. (Photo: Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times)

A Seal Visits the Upper West Sideby John SullivanCute is not a word normally associated with the Hudson River waterfront but when a juvenile harbor seal decided to take some sun at the 79th Street boat basin, the word sprang to mind. “He was moving around pretty fine, yawning and sunning himself,” said Sgt. Rakeem Taylor, an urban park ranger for the city Parks Department.

Sergeant Taylor said the workers spotted the seal just before 10 a.m. The animal, which he estimated to be 3 to 4 feet long and about 90 pounds, was lying on the dock.

“It’s not that unusual, but we don’t usually get a chance to see them,” Sergeant Taylor said of the visitor. “It’s about as unusual as getting the occasional coyote.”

He said the presence of the seal was a positive one. “It is definitely a sign that the river is in better shape that they are coming up this far for fish,” he said.

Harbor seals typically stay around for day or two before moving on. Sergeant Taylor said he watched the seal for about 40 minutes on Monday and planned to return “tomorrow and see if he is still hanging out.”

On a scale of 1 to 10 for unusual animals, Sergeant Taylor said, the seal rated about a 4 or 5. The strangest animal he has seen in eight years with the department?

“A nine-foot boa constrictor in Central Park,” he said. “That had to be an 8 or a 9.”

Click the photos to go to the individual photographer's sites on Flickr"Blog This" I only use Flickr pictures where the blog function is enabled. This means the photographer has allowed their pictures to be used in blogs. I only want to include people who don't mind being brought into a web world like this. I do not just take what I see.